I am thrilled to be hosting a spot
on the OBSERVER by Robert Lanza & Nancy Kress Blog Tour hosted by Rockstar Book Tours. Check out
my post and make sure to enter the giveaway!
About The Book:
Author: Robert Lanza & Nancy Kress
Pub. Date: January 10, 2023
Publisher: The Story Plant
Formats: Hardcover, eBook, Audiobook
Pages: 368
Find it: Goodreads, https://books2read.com/OBSERVER
A
mind-expanding journey to the very edge of science.
Caro Soames-Watkins, a talented neurosurgeon whose career has been upended by
controversy, is jobless, broke, and the sole supporter of her sister, a single
mother with a severely disabled child.
When she receives a strange job offer from Nobel Prize-winning scientist Sam
Watkins, a great uncle she barely knows, desperation forces her to take it in
spite of serious suspicions.
Watkins has built a mysterious medical facility in the Caribbean to conduct
research into the nature of consciousness, reality, and life after death.
Helped in his mission by his old friend, eminent physicist George Weigert, and
young tech entrepreneur Julian Dey, Sam has gone far beyond curing the body to
develop a technology that could solve the riddle of mortality.
Two obstacles stand in their way: someone on the inside is leaking intel and
Watkins' failing body must last long enough for the technology to be ready.
As danger mounts, Caro finds more than she bargained for, including murder,
love, and a deeper understanding into the nature of reality.
A mind-expanding journey to the very edges of science, Observer will
thrill you, inspire you, and lead you to think about life and the power of the
imagination in startling new ways.
MY FAVORITE MOVIES, SORT OF
by Nancy Kress
It’s impossible to name my favorite movies of all time, because once you hit 70, you have a lot of past time in which you saw a lot of past movies. So I’ll confine myself to favorite movies of the past few years. And before any of you start fuming (“Why didn’t she mention X? X was wonderful! X was—pick one—ground-breaking, subtle and nuanced, the epitome of Y! How could she ignore X?”), let me add that I have not seen every movie available in the last two years. Or the last year. Or the last month. But of what I did see, these were “Sticky.” Stickiness is a good measure of movies. It means that the plot or characters or cinematography or acting or something stuck in your head (although it doesn’t count if they’ve stuck because you saw it two nights ago.) So, an idiosyncratic list of recent sticky movies:
Everything Everywhere All At Once (2023). I have never seen anything like this before. I’m not sure there has been anything like it before. In the beginning, we are in mundane reality (and nothing is more mundane and real than a tax audit). Then we are somewhere else, just as bewildered as the character who finds herself there. Things get more complicated, wackier, more inexplicable—until the explanation is grasped and the tension sets in—can these possibly succeed? And then, following the tension, the emotion, as we see through their pasts just how and why each flawed character behaves as they do. Ultimately, the movie centers on relationship: mother/daughter, husband/wife, as well as the relationships we could have had but chose not to. The actors are all wonderful, the invention endless, and who knew that you could do super-effective kung fu with a fanny pack?
Tár (2023). This long, understated movie is the antithesis of Everything Everywhere. Firmly rooted in the current world of classical music, it builds very slowly as we see facets of superstar conductor Lydia Tár’s character. The film is a classic rise-and-fall-power-corrupts tale. It is also a counter to those who believe that predatory and unfeeling behavior belongs solely to “toxic masculinity.” But what really makes the movie is Cate Blanchett’s performance, which will earn her an Oscar if there is any cosmic justice (alas, there isn’t).
Don’t Look Up (2021). Satire about either covid or climate change without ever mentioning either one. Instead, a comet is going to strike Earth and wipe out all human civilization. Some people think the danger is overstated, some think it’s a hoax, some freak out, some dig bunkers, some immediately calculate how this can be used for political gain (“The comet will save jobs!”), some (mostly scientists) beat their heads against walls trying to get someone to listen to the facts. In short, a satiric look at the varieties of human folly, succeeding by its very outrageousness.
Eighth Grade (2018). This one is older, but the stickiest of the bunch. Heart-breaking, perfect-pitch film about early adolescence, the social haves and have-nots, and teens’ love affair with social media. Four years later, it is still firmly in my head.
You may have noticed that although I am a science fiction writer, the two science fiction films that stuck to me are not serious looks at science, tech, or the future. Although there are a few SF movies I like quite a lot (Arrival, Her), most of them assume that technology is synonymous with magic so if you just throw around a few “scientific terms,” you can make your plot do anything. Case in point: Interstellar, in which the only things that can escape a black hole are Hawking radiation and Matthew McConaughey. ‘Nuff said.
About Robert Lanza:
Robert Lanza is an American scientist
and author whose research spans the range of natural science, from biology to
theoretical physics. TIME magazine recognized him as one of the “100 Most
Influential People in the World,” and Prospect magazine named him one of the
"Top 50 World Thinkers.”
He has hundreds of scientific
publications and over 30 books, including definitive references in the fields
of stem cells, tissue engineering, and regenerative medicine. He is a former
Fulbright Scholar, and studied with polio-pioneer Jonas Salk and Nobel
laureates Gerald Edelman (known for his work on the biological basis of
consciousness) and Rodney Porter. He also worked closely (and co-authored
papers in Science on self-awareness and symbolic communication) with noted
Harvard psychologist BF Skinner. Dr. Lanza received his undergraduate and
medical degrees from the University of Pennsylvania, where he was both a
University Scholar and Benjamin Franklin Scholar.
Lanza was part of the team that
cloned the world’s first human embryo, the first endangered species, and
published the first-ever reports of pluripotent stem cell use in humans.
Lanza and his colleagues were also
the first to demonstrate that nuclear transplantation could be used to reverse
the aging process and to generate immune-compatible tissues, including the
first organ tissue-engineered from cloned cells. One of his early achievements
was his demonstration that techniques used in preimplantation genetic diagnosis
could be used to generate human embryonic stem cells without embryonic
destruction.
He and colleagues have also succeeded
in differentiating human pluripotent stem cells into retinal cells, and has
shown that they provide long-term benefit in animal models of vision loss.
Using this technology some forms of blindness may be curable, including macular
degeneration and Stargardt disease, a currently untreatable form eye disease
that causes blindness in teenagers and young adults. Lanza's company received
FDA approval to carry out clinical trials in the US using them to treat
degenerative eye diseases, as well approval for the first human pluripotent stem
cell trial in Europe. The first patients reported improved vision in the eyes
treated with the cells, which The Guardian said "represents a huge
scientific achievement."
Dr. Lanza and his colleagues
published the first-ever report of human pluripotent stem cells transplanted
into human patients. The patients who received the stem cell transplants say
their lives have been transformed by the experimental procedure--they report
that they can use their computers, thread a needle, or even go to the mall or airport
on their own.
Lanza has also been a major player in
the scientific revolution that has led to the documentation that nuclear
transfer/transcription factors can restore developmental potential in a
differentiated cell. One of his successes was showing that it is feasible to
generate functional oxygen-carrying red blood cells from human pluripotent stem
cells. The blood cells were comparable to normal transfusable blood and could
serve as a potentially inexhaustible source of "universal" blood. His
team also discovered how to generate functional hemangioblasts - a population
of "ambulance" cells - from hES cells. In animals, these cells
quickly repaired vascular damage, cutting the death rate after a heart attack
in half and restoring the blood flow to ischemic limbs that might otherwise
have to be amputated.
Lanza and a team lead by Kwang-Soo
Kim at Harvard University have also reported a safe method for generating
induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells. Human iPS cells were created from skin
cells by direct delivery of proteins, thus eliminating the harmful risks
associated with genetic manipulation. The Editors of the prestigious journal
Nature selected Lanza and Kim's paper on protein reprogramming as one of five
"Research Highlights." Discover magazine stated, "Lanza's
single-minded quest to usher in this new age has paid dividends in scientific
insights and groundbreaking discoveries." Fortune magazine called him
"the standard-bearer for stem cell research.”
Dr. Lanza has received numerous
awards, including being named one of TIME Magazine's "100 Most Influential
People in the World"; the 2013 Il Leone di San Marco award in Medicine
(The Italian Heritage and Culture Committee, along with Regis Philbin [in
Entertainment]); including an NIH Director's Award (2010) for "Translating
Basic Science Discoveries into New and Better Treatments"; the 2010
'Movers and Shakers' Who Will Shape Biotech Over the Next 20 Years
(BioWorld)(along with Craig Venter and President Barack Obama); the 2007 100
Most Inspiring People in the Life-Sciences Industry (PharmaVOICE, "For his
discoveries 'behind the medicines making a significant impact on the pipelines
of today and of the future'"; the 2007 Outstanding Contribution in
Contemporary Biology Award (Brown University, "For his groundbreaking
research and contributions in stem cell science and biology"; the 2006
All-Star Award for Biotechnology (MA High Tech, for "pushing stem cells'
future"); the 2005 Rave Award for Medicine (Wired magazine, "For
eye-opening work on embryonic stem cells"); and Lanza is listed in Who's
Who in America, Who's Who in the World, Who's Who in Medicine and Healthcare,
Who's Who in Science and Engineering; Who's Who in American Education, and
Who's Who in Technology, among others.
Dr. Lanza and his research have been
featured in almost every media outlet in the world, including CNN, TIME,
Newsweek, People, as well as the front pages of the New York Times, Wall Street
Journal, Washington Post, among others (his work has also been the cover story
of US News & World Report, Wired magazine, and Scientific American).
In 2007, Lanza published a feature
article, "A New Theory of the Universe" in The American Scholar, a
leading intellectual journal which has previously published works by Albert
Einstein, Margaret Mead, and Carl Sagan, among others. His theory places
biology above the other sciences in an attempt to solve one of nature's biggest
puzzles, the theory of everything that other disciplines have been pursuing for
the last century. This new view has become known as Biocentrism. In
biocentrism, space and time are forms of animal sense perception, rather than
external physical objects. Understanding this more fully yields answers to
several major puzzles of mainstream science, and offers a new way of understanding
everything from the microworld (for instance, the reason for Heisenberg's
uncertainty principle and the double-slit experiment) to the forces, constants,
and laws that shape the universe. Nobel laureate E. Donnall Thomas stated
"Any short statement does not do justice to such a scholarly work. The
work is a scholarly consideration of science and philosophy that brings biology
into the central role in unifying the whole."
You can read more about Dr. Robert
Lanza's work at:
Website | Twitter | Facebook | Goodreads | Amazon | BookBub
Nancy Kress
is the author of thirty-four books, including twenty-six novels, four
collections of short stories, and three books on writing. Her work has won six
Nebulas, two Hugos, a Sturgeon, and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award. She
writes frequently about genetic engineering; including the acclaimed
science-fiction novel Beggars in Spain. Kress’s fiction has been translated
into Swedish, Danish, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Polish, Croatian,
Chinese, Lithuanian, Romanian, Japanese, Korean, Hebrew, Russian, and Klingon,
none of which she can read. In addition to writing, Kress often teaches at
various venues around the country and abroad, including a visiting lectureship
at the University of Leipzig, a 2017 writing class in Beijing, and the annual intensive
workshop TaosToolbox. Kress lives in Seattle with her husband, writer Jack
Skillingstead, and Pippin, the world’s most spoiled Chihuahua.
Website | Goodreads | Amazon | BookBub
Giveaway Details:
1 winner
will receive a $10 Amazon Gift Card, International.
Ends January 24th, midnight EST.
a Rafflecopter giveawayTour Schedule:
Week One:
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1/9/2023 |
Guest Post/IG Post |
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1/9/2023 |
Guest Post |
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1/10/2023 |
Excerpt/IG Post |
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1/10/2023 |
Guest Post |
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1/11/2023 |
Review |
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1/11/2023 |
Excerpt |
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1/12/2023 |
TikTok Review/IG Post |
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1/12/2023 |
Review |
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1/13/2023 |
IG Review/LFL Drop Pic |
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1/13/2023 |
Review/IG Post |
Week Two:
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1/16/2023 |
Facebook Review/IG Review |
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1/16/2023 |
Guest Post/IG Post |
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1/17/2023 |
IG Review |
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1/17/2023 |
IG Review/TikTok Post |
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1/18/2023 |
Excerpt/IG Post |
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1/18/2023 |
Review/IG Post |
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1/19/2023 |
Review/IG Post |
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1/19/2023 |
Excerpt/IG Post |
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1/20/2023 |
IG Review |
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1/20/2023 |
Review |
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